Come on Baby Light My Ire

In light of the recent death of Val Kilmer and the recent announcement that I will be appointed Santa Barbara Poet Laureate for 2025-2027 (with no guarantee poetry, the country, or you and me will be here for the full two years), I recalled an op-ed I wrote while I was a lecturer in the English Department at Penn State way back in 1991. Thanks to the internets, everything you've ever written can eventually surface. I was young(er) then, so excuse my impudent tone, but I think this holds up.

Groove to the Beat, But Don't Call Rock Stars Poets

originally published May 1, 1991

 Ah, for the days of yore, when exams smelled of fresh mimeograph fluid, and the end of the semester had, as it should, its own distinct stink. To recapture some of the magic of those long-gone days, I thought I'd give Collegian readers a pop exam.

Name three living poets.

I'm waiting.

One living poet?

OK, I heard somebody whisper Jim Morrison. One: He's not living. Two: He never was a poet, so even if he is alive on that island of the Dead and Famous, it doesn't matter. In fact, Oliver Stone and The Doors movie did more to misrepresent poetry than anything since Dead Poets Society, which proffered the mind-numbingly regular metrics of "O Captain, My Captain" as the peak of Whitman.

As for The Doors, believe it or not, most poets don't see Native American dancing about when they write. Most poets do not do enough drugs to make their hearts explode at 27. Most poets don't have naked honeys groove to their words (yeah, here I'm bitter, as a sometime poet myself.) Most important, most poets don't write endless drivel to their diddle; Morrison was as phallocentric as a Maypole.

Yet, it's not surprising a director as heavy-handed as the aptly named Stone would find Morrison a worthy successor to Blake and Byron. Stone, who in Platoon reduced Vietnam to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad we killed lots of Vietnamese to find out.) Stone, who in Wall Street reduced the greedy grabbing of the 1980s to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad trickle-down economics left more people poor than at any time since the Depression).

Stone is simple-minded, and Morrison is a poet for the simple. Sure, he was a Sure, he was a magnetic rock star, and the band helped open up rock music to the influences of jazz, but to call Morrison a poet is ridiculous. Such a claim makes lines like "we need great golden copulations," "death and my cock are the world," and "mute nostril agony" something they aren't.

And, no, I'm not just saying rock lyrics are hackwork and poetry is ethereal. Rock lyrics can deepen music, can create emotion and mood, can even sparkle. But it's enough to call them good lyrics; we don't need to elevate them to the haughty level of poetry to bestow greatness upon them. It's fine for Elvis Costello to do his thing, and for Wallace Stevens to do another. (Costello is much better singing about blue chairs than blue guitars, and as for Stevens . . . well, studies have shown no insurance salesman can rock out.) As a teacher of mine once said, "The term art merely means 'I like it a whole bunch.'"

But, as Raymond Chandler wrote, "All good art is entertainment and anyone who says differently is a stuffed shirt and juvenile at the art of living." Following Chandler, I want to suggest something much more revolutionary -- that poetry is entertainment. That living people write it. That it takes work to do and isn't the product of lightning bolts or chemical muses. That if more people read poetry, the world might be a better place.

While the violins warm up in the background, and I climb a soapbox taller than Mount Nittany, settle on in. I'm going to make a pitch for poetry.

Poetry attests to complexity; as Valery said, "All lofty thinking ends in a sigh." Poetry is honest exploration in a television world where the only question is How to get laid and the easy answer is Have the brightest smile and the driest underarms.

Poetry is difficult; that's why we run from it. It allows for lines like Bill Knott's, "Ancestor-silencing is difficult when you you're the one/ who forgot to patent the dodo." The syllables pile up so that we are forced to slow down, to halt our rush to evolution.

Poetry not only makes us re-think, but think. Instead of chowing down Pentagon-pushed myths of heroism, we get Jack Gilbert telling us "the abnormal is not courage: The marriage, not the month's rapture." Instead of the America first military mentality that makes football another form of ground war (of thee Whitney Houston lip-synchs), we get Rodney Jones dreaming up death as the ultimate fullback in the poem "Sweep," in which he writes, "I have been home three days, listening to an obituary."

Poetry is a mirror in which we see ourselves in the brightest light. In a poem about something as everyday as a radio request, Maria Flook writes: "It is difficult to humiliate desire;/ that in itself is important to note,/ if it is late at night/ and someone is saying, 'This is for that girl/ on the island, God bless her.'/ The sea is the same. I am the same. Fish swim/ to the false surface of the searchlight." Poetry lets Flook embrace pop music and all its pathos, while seeing through the bathos, lets her hold love up to hope, yet lament.

Yet lamenting poetry is what this column must do. Now, only poets read poetry; everybody else reads Kitty Kelley. Somewhere in too many minds hides the ghost of a high school English teacher who was nearly a ghost himself, reciting Verse in a trebly voice. (He's the same guy who taught you the five paragraph theme -- hunt him down and kill him.) And read some recent poetry; it might be a moment like this one described by Denis Johnson: "As the record falls and the snake-band chords begin/ to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones."

A Review of "What Nails It" by Greil Marcus

 

Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that’s a worthy task. For Marcus’s short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It—part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures—makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer’s noggin. He writes, “I live for those moments when something appears on the page as it of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.”

Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting—or discounting—his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music and second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meet Sex Pistol punk Johhny (Lydon) Rotten.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review Books.

A Review of "This Bird Has Flown" by Susanna Hoffs

 

If you have ever wondered what life’s like for a one-hit wonder, Susanna Hoffs’ debut novel This Bird Has Flown is for you. The book’s 33-year-old protagonist Jane Start had one big record a decade ago, a cover of a lesser known tune by a mercurial, brilliant superstar the book invents, Jonesy. Jonesy comes off as part Bowie—who, you might recall, was born David Jones—and part Prince—who happened to pen one of Hoffs’ band The Bangles’ biggest hits, “Manic Monday.” It’s the kind of book where you keep getting to play with rock history nuggets like that as fun Easter eggs, though perhaps none of them top, “Tours with siblings. That has to be fraught.” (Sorry, former Banglemates Vicki and Debbi Peterson!)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

This review was also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 7, 2024.

A Review of "Lou Reed: The King of New York" by Will Hermes

 

Will Hermes admits he’s on a fool’s errand with the opening quote of the preface to his 529 page biography of Lou Reed. The mercurial genius most famous as the leader of the Velvet Underground once told journalist Jonathan Cott, “There’s no reason to get into autobiographical things with me, because I’m a writer and a musician.” But Hermes, a diligent researcher (he makes clear he’s even read the archive of Reed’s sometimes terrifying “fan” mail), perceptive critic, canny social historian, and flat out elegant writer, is more than up to the task for what he himself calls “myth parsing.” As he puts it, “One gets the sense that memories might be clouded by subsequent myth, every double scotch or methamphetamine injection magnified into more smoking-gun evidence of the ‘Lou Reed’ character he blurred into by the mid-’70s.” 

 Then again, Reed went through a lot. Born in 1942 on suburban Long Island to a respectable middle class Jewish family—Hermes does wonderful work connecting Reed to that heritage—Lewis Allan Reed knew he was queer at age 12 almost two decades before Stonewall. Drawn to music and literature, New York City beckoned as it did to every artsy person in the northeast in the late 20th century. Alas Reed’s first and only year at NYU ended with him back at home and getting electroshock therapy (Hermes puts this seemingly barbaric practice into scary historic context: “In lieu of commitment to a mental hospital, an option that may have also been on the table, outpatient ECT probably seemed the lesser evil.”) Eventually Reed attends Syracuse, only to get his first case of hepatitis—and liver failure would be what led to his death in 2013—the first time he shoots heroin. It’s as if he was creating a life that could only be rock ‘n’ roll mythic.

Want to read the rest then do so at California Review of Books.

This review was also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 1, 2024.